One of the messages in my Yahoo mail this morning was from Gather, and asked to know how I intended to address Memorial Day. I have been thinking about this all morning without any good answer. I always joke that my birthday tends to fall on or around Memorial Day, so I get an extra long weekend. Advertising for the holiday focuses on barbecues, picnics and family outings not dissimilar to Labor Day and July 4th. It is rare that I see anyone actually address what Memorial Day signifies.
I was thining about this while reading the NY Times. Every day, I read the news, and it seems that every day another soldier dies over there in the desert. Every day, there is some new and inventive way to put together or hide IEDs. In the search for the missing soldiers,
other people die. It is hard not to wonder what the hell is going on anymore, if anyone has any idea what we are doing.
If I believed that we could do something concrete and good in Iraq, if I believed we were fighting a war for a cause other than Haliburton's bottom line, I could support it. I don't even know what to make of this. I read the news and I wonder if there is any point to this anymore. In the beginning when people would talk about how this would be my generation's Vietnam, that comparison was dismissed as too dramatic. I have to wonder though. It seems more and more apt every day.
I think about Bob, and how close he came to dying in Baghdad. He's walking around, scarred but alive. His friend was just ahead of him in the truck and didn't make it. A boy I grew up with died, and a boy I went to high school with died. I have the feeling that no one is going to get out of this alive.
(And yes, dozens and hundreds of Iraqis die as well. I fully recognize that, but it isn't what I'm going to talk about right now. Please don't mistake that for a lack of sympathy for the massive scale of death and devastation suffered by ordinary people.)